Hey all - I got Van Helsing II's closed beta early. I put together a 20 minute video showing the game in action instead of posting up the usual video from the publisher, but the game actually plays as good as it looks. Something to be excited for next month!

I love Grim Dawn so far but at Crate's glacial progress pace (they don't expect to finish up Act 3 until the end of 2014 and no ETA on co-op though they did hire a key Titan Quest multiplayer programmer a while back), Van Helsing III will probably release before Grim Dawn does.

Although I obviously loved Van Helsing for a while and posted a lot about it here back last June, after playing Grim Dawn and Marvel Heroes, Van Helsing no longer measured up for me. Same ARPG genre and all, I just couldn't get back into VH's play style when I revisited it, even after buying some of the DLC. Also found its co-op very clumsily implemented - I hope the sequel cleans that up a bit.

My other axe to grind is they messed up the idea of difficulty levels. Instead of finishing at a difficulty level, and then starting at the next with the equipment you had to that point (as an example); you'd instead then start at normal with NOTHING, ZIP, NADA. Which didn't make sense, esp. given that you didn't start getting good stuff at the next difficulty level at the beginning. So I lost interest after completing the campaign once.

You can pre-order to get beta access, essentially like a Kickstarter type of thing. I went with the $50 pack to show support and get all future DLC. Haven't had time to check it out yet but based on the preview sounds like a no-brainer.